Kagome truss plates have properties that suggest they should be uniquely effective as an actuation plane for sandwich plates: a Kagome truss plate has in-plane isotropy, optimal stiffness and strength, and its truss members can be actuated with minimal internal resistance. In this paper, sandwich plates are studied that are comprised of one solid face sheet and one actuated Kagome face sheet jo...

This work concerns the stress-state identification, produced by loads or dislocations, of statically indeterminate structures. In particular, this paper deals with the case of pin-jointed trusses, since they are a combination of simplicity of the structural model with very interesting technical applications. We present an approach that follows the main guidelines of the flexibility method to re...

Traditional truss design and analysis assumes pinned joints at the connections. Other design provisions recommend that the trusses be designed and analyzed as frame structures, with careful consideration of the stress, timber behavior, and joint response. A large body of knowledge has been compiled detailing truss behavior as it relates to member properties and responses. However, the modeling ...

A novel hybrid FRP-aluminum truss system has been employed in a two-rut modular bridge superstructure composed of twin inverted triangular trusses. The actual flexural behavior of a one-rut truss has been previously investigated under the on-axis loading test; however, the structural performance of the one-rut truss subjected to an off-axis load is still not fully understood. In this paper, a g...

The design methodology described in this paper takes a substantial shift from conventional methods. Traditionally sizing is based on the worst expected load scenario. By contrast to this conventional passive approach the method presented here replaces passive member strategically with active elements (actuators) which are only activated when the loads reach a certain threshold. The structure ca...

This paper reports research on the design of structures using genetic algorithms. It presents the design of a program that uses genetic algorithms to optimize a truss structure, along with an example of truss optimization.

Dynamic response of a structure is a remarkable characteristic which can be optimized (controlled) by imposing constraints on natural frequencies. But it is mentionable that size and shape optimization of trusses with multiple frequency constraints is a very non-linear and non-convex problem that may be converged to local optima when using meta-heuristic algorithms. To concur this problem, rese...

This paper describes the encoding of domain knowledge for use by a genetic algorithm. We use the domain of system connguration design problems; speciically, the structural design and optimization of trusses to ground our discussion and results. The approach applies evolutionary principles to the optimally directed connguration design of complex structures and incorporates engineering domain kno...

An optimization approach is presented for enumerating pin-jointed bistable compliant mechanisms. In the first stage, the statically determinate trusses with non-crossing members containing a given set of nodes and some pre-defined members are regarded as minimally rigid framework or a Laman framework, and are enumerated without repetitions by the graph enumeration algorithm. In the second stage...

The prevention of fall from height accidents has long been a popular topic in the field of construction safety. Previous research has indicated one of the potential hazards was induced by the use of steel bracket as scaffold support. While researchers are focusing to improve the existing scaffolding system, this research introduces a newly developed device to minimize fall accidents. The workin...